App Delivery by the Spoonfull
Spoon CEO and founder Kenji Obata is sleep-deprived, but he's having too much fun blowing people away with Spoon Server, his new Web-based, desktop application delivery product, to slow down. Of his product, he declares, "It's a mind-bogglingly simple approach to application delivery." The competition? He calls them "press release companies," adding, "We're really the only player." His take on TechEd: "We literally took orders at the show."
Everything about this product seems to be simple and straightforward, including its description: "Spoon Server allows enterprise IT managers and software publishers to deliver desktop apps via the Web without installs, long downloads, or dependencies such as .NET. Spoon works without administrative privileges, device drivers, or code changes, streams efficiently over the Web and wide area networks, and is 100 times more scalable than remote desktop-based delivery methods."
The litany goes on: With Spoon (formerly Xenocode), app deployment is simple, maintenance and support costs are slashed, and you can forget about encapsulating apps for Windows 7 migrations because with Spoon Server, they run as they are, without modification. Of course enterprises can deliver their desktop apps whenever and wherever not only via the Web, but through Microsoft SharePoint, the start menu, or even locked-down desktops.
Although this versatile product is popular with games such as World of Goo and Oregon Trail, software publishers and ISVs are prime target customers, and Autodesk is an early user that can publish their applications directly from its website, which is good for users because they save the time and money associated with installations.
Obato's long-term goal is to have "every app" on Spoon, so everybody will come to them for pre-streamed apps that are ready to run. At this point, disbelief may be the biggest barrier to Spoon's success. According to Obato, "People don't believe it can be real. They think it's too good to be true."
Spoon Server is priced under a per-seat license model for enterprises and on a per-app basis for software publishers. A free evaluation copy can be found at http://spoon.net.
Revision: Moving to another topic, in the wake of my July 13 blog "vSphere 4.1 Flexes Muscles, Trims Costs," I received an e-mail from a VMware PR person asking me to point out that ESXi has supplemented ESX as the preferred hypervisor architecture, and that veteran ESX users don't have to migrate to vSphere Hypervisor, but to the ESXi architecture.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 07/15/2010 at 12:48 PM